The last Peanutsy place for me to cover from my Japan trip is Snoopy Town Shop, a chain of Peanuts merchandise stores. I stopped by one on the top store of a mall in Kyoto.
They carried an array of items, but nothing too surprising – apparel, phone cases, toiletries, figures, some blind boxes, and so forth. I was a little surprised at how much attention was given to Faron, teamed with Snoopy on various items.
What didn’t they have? Well, books. I always find it disappointing when there are zero books of Peanuts strips at a Peanuts-oriented site. Yes, I know that for many people Peanuts is more a set of symbols than it is the classic strip off of which all this stuff is derived, but if I were King Of The Intellectual Property, I would demand that all such places carry at least one strip collection, to keep watering the roots of the lovely tree that is Peanuts.
So did I get anything? Well, yes. Three things.
I reckoned I needed something that visibly recorded having done some Snoopying in Japan, so a bag that celebrated Peanuts in Kyoto would seem to do the job. And I’m throwing a party next week which I wanted to filled with snacks from Japan, so a cheap batch of Snoopy cookies would do it. And I promised Mrs. AAUGH Blogger that I would pick up some Japanese teas, and up until that point on my trip I had only seen the same teas that were available in the US, so I chose one of the three flavors of the Snoopy Tea Project’s Snootea, the Peach and Apricot Blend blended by Shuntarou Kumazaki. 1000 yen – that’s 10 bucks – for six tea bags. Not exactly a bargain. But hey, when you’re paying umpty-ump dollars to be in Japan, everything else is a rounding error, right?
The Japan trip was very good, a nice recharge for me. And now I’m back in the states, de-recharging!
